Troubled Waters

The failure of the levee was an ominous sign for the areas downriver on the Mississippi, especially the 195 miles between the Missouri River junction and where the Ohio comes in at Cairo, Ill. Below that, the Mississippi opens up dramatically. With the Ohio low this year, it has plenty of spare capacity. The area north of Cairo is lightly settled, but it includes the city of Cape Girardeau, Mo., and the historic town of Ste. Genevieve, settled by French pioneers from New Orleans in the mid-18th century. In a few weeks the 4,500 residents, and volunteers from as far as 400 miles away, barricaded the town with more than half a million sandbags. The schoolyard presented the unique spectacle of scores of children amid dozens of five-foot-high piles of sand and not playing in it. They were working: holding the bags open, filling them by the fistful and tying them off, grown-ups wielded shovels, stacked the bags on pallets and loaded them onto pickup trucks. It was virtually the only thing going on in town all week. At an empty restaurant a waitress watched Dan Rather filling a sandbag in Des Moines. "He should come down here if he wants to work," she muttered.

The people of Ste. Genevieve were engaged in one of civilization's oldest struggles, for which the rules of engagement were fixed at the Creation: water flows down slopes and collects on the flats. You oppose it with a greater weight of something compact and transportable, like sand. The army engineers have at their disposal the mighty gates of the 29 dams on the Mississippi itself and the 36 reservoirs on upstream tributaries. They have round-the-clock weather forecasts from the Weather Channel, their own weather radar and a network of remote rainfall and depth gauges throughout the watershed, linked to corps offices by satellite so a drop of rain is measured when it falls and is tracked by computer until it drops off the continent into the sea.

Opened gates:  But nature has preempted their efforts. For five weeks a high-pressure system over the eastern part of the country has been pumping warm moist air from the Gulf of Mexico and dumping it in thunderstorms over the upper Midwest where it meets the jet stream. The rain line "is just sagging back and forth between Interstate 70 and Interstate 80," said Bill Dieffenbach of the Missouri Conservation Department. Since spring the gates have been opened wide on the Mississippi to speed it on its way, and the reservoirs have been holding back every drop within the limits of safety, but the river has flooded nonetheless. So the corps is reduced to monitoring the slow progress of the disaster and issuing forecasts, revised daily, of where and when the river will peak. Officials in towns along the river then take these state-of-the-art computerized forecasts and use them to direct hundreds of sweating volunteers in the primitive and backbreaking labor of piling up sandbags by hand.

Everyone had nightmares last week about a levee breakthrough. Steven Meek Sr., a 42-year-old bus driver who was forced from his house in the St. Louis suburb of Lemay on July 9, dreamed twice the following week of going down the bathtub drain in a swirl. But the actual experience of the flood is more commonly one of misery than terror. "I feel about 65 right now," says Meek's wife, Jacki, 40. "I see my house on the news, and I just cry." The Mississippi doesn't sweep houses away in a rush; it fills them with mud. The residents watch the water creep up their lawns until they decide it's time to get aboard one of the National Guard trucks, or boats, and head for higher ground. The optimists among them move as much as they can to the top floor, sandbag the foundation, board up the doors with plywood, seal the boards with caulking, cap the drains on lower floors to prevent sewage from backing up into the house and start up a pump in the basement. The pessimists just move stuff to the top floor and open all the windows, on the assumption that the house will be flooded anyway and that at least will save them having to replace glass broken by floating debris. Jacki Meek had a more realistic nightmare: she dreamed about packing an endless mountain of boxes.

The flooded towns have a curiously serene air about them, the water lapping at the second-floor windows, propane tanks floating in the yards like fat, dozing pets. The underwater fields are by contrast unsettling—brown lakes in which cornstalks wave just below the surface and solitary trees grow straight from the waterline. Almost the entire hamlet of West Alton, far out on the St. Charles Peninsula, was deserted last week. Coast guard teams patrolled the streets in powerful motorboats, but with no one to rescue they were reduced to escorting camera crews and checking on abandoned pets. Coast guard policy on pet rescues is "only when in imminent danger," but it's hard to enforce with TV crews watching all the time. Petty Officer Steven Daugherty left a cat and four kittens in what he considered a safe location, but when he went back the next day he could find only one kitten. "I was about to jump in the water myself and look for them," he said; but it turned out the family had returned to the house before he did and rescued all but the one kitten, which had been biding. This narrowly averted a public-relations disaster for the coast guard; the TV station covering the saga had been flooded by outraged citizens concerned for the animals' safety.

In some ways, the Great Flood was a model disaster. Red Cross and Salvation Army shelters (some of the latter staffed by volunteers recruited from among the more conventionally homeless) kept all the victims fed and dry. There were virtually no reports of looting or vandalism of the abandoned houses, although the flood did embarrassingly call attention to the fact that a floodgate, comprising 27 aluminum panels weighing a total of more than a ton, had been stolen from hapless East St. Louis in 1990 and never replaced. From all over the country came offers of help, some more useful than others. Southern Florida, recalling the assistance it received from Iowa residents after Hurricane Andrew, sent the only thing Des Moines asked for, drinking water. Fifteen hundred miles is a long way to ship something that was available in suburbs right outside the town, but never mind. Americans appear to have come a long way in compassion since 1927, when another big flood left hundreds dead, inspiring The Atlanta Constitution to a front-page editorial congratulating its readers on having chosen to live in Atlanta instead of along the Mississippi.